The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word

Chapter 4. A Lingering Place of Relinquishment

71 4 A Lingering Place of Relinquishment The world of Jerusalem, as the prophets find it, was on its way to loss. They imagined that the loss was linked to YHWH as divine punishment. They imagined, outside the box of establishment excuses and explanations, that the destruction of the city and the forced departure from the city were because of Israel’s long-term recalcitrance against the Sinai covenant. They imagined differently, as though YHWH were inevitably front and center in their discernment of the city. Thus my thesis: Prophetic preaching is an effort to imagine the world as though YHWH, the creator of heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we name as Father, Son, and Spirit, is a real character and the defining agent in the world. There is no doubt that the prophetic theme is divine judgment, though, as we have seen, the pending punishment is not voiced simply as supernatural intrusion but as the inescapable outworking of the deeds and policies of Jerusalem that evoked devastating consequences. I If the prophetic theme had been simply divine judgment, it might have been resolved, in their imagination, simply as guilt, punishment, and perhaps 72 The Practice of Prophetic Imagination repentance. Or it could have been rendered simply as anger toward God and rejection of God that evoked a like response from God who then had anger toward Israel and rejected Israel. It is, clear, however, that divine judgment is in fact a subset of the overriding reality of loss. Loss, as we all know, admits of no quick resolution. It lingers; and we linger in it. It lingers through the long nights with unrelenting force. And when it does, one has no option but to live with it and hopefully to live through it. And because loss is the overwhelming reality and divine judgment is a subset of prophetic imagination that seeks to make sense out of loss, I want in this presentation to explore the awareness that divine anger, rejection, and alienation are decisively qualified, in the prophetic horizon, by the working of empathy. For loss per se does not of itself indicate anger. It is marked by anger from God only if the loss is known to be punishment. But if loss is more elemental than judgment, then I propose that empathy is even more elemental than anger. The issue is important because much of our notion of prophetic preaching revolves around divine anger and consequently righteous indignation. Here I observe that we have, in such a caricature, missed the prophetic point that divine judgment is shot through with divine pathos, a theme first celebrated in contemporary interpretation by Abraham Heschel.1 And if “empathy” witnesses to the claim that YHWH is deeply moved, troubled, and staggered by Israel’s loss, then the pathos of God, the passionate feeling of God, eventuates in empathy and in sympathy, in solidarity that in biblical terminology comes as compassion (passion—“to suffer,” com—“with,” compassion—“to suffer with.”) Thus YHWH is imagined as standing alongside Israel in its loss, as though YHWH were helpless to avert the loss, as though the loss were as acutely felt by YHWH as it was felt by Israel. The move of pathos from the lived experience of Israel to the designated experience of YHWH is indeed an act of imagination. Unless we embrace that act of imagination, however, loss becomes unvexed punishment on the part of YHWH. Contrary to that, the prophetic texts witness that YHWH is profoundly vexed by Israel’s loss that must, perforce, be enacted in Jerusalem. In this discussion. I will consider the process of Israel’s pathos over loss, and then I will reflect on YHWH’s pathos over that loss. I will trace these twin dimensions of pathos to the bottom and watch the move to recovery from pathos. Both Israel and YHWH will, in the prophetic drama, move beyond pathos. But neither will move quickly or easily or clearly beyond, for loss leaves its mark. In this connection, I am reminded of the shrewd quip of the great New York senator, Patrick Moynihan, when he reflected on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and witnessed the ongoing loss for A Lingering Place of Relinquishment 73 Jacqueline and her entourage of which he was a part. He said of the Kennedy grief, perhaps of all the United States caught up in...